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Snatching CO2 back from the air

Carbon Engineering hopes sucking back greenhouses gasses can become a viable business.

A rendering of a commercial-scale CO2 air capture system being designed by Calgary-based Carbon Engineering. The company hopes to one day make it economical to pull CO2 from the air. (Carbon Engineering)

By Tyler HamiltonClimate and Economy ReporterClimate and Economy Reporter

Thu., Oct. 8, 2015

Residents of Squamish, B.C., will witness history this week when a small company from Alberta flicks the switch on an industrial facility that chemically grabs carbon dioxide out of thin air.

The facility, designed and built with support from billionaires Bill Gates and oilsands financier Murray Edwards, isn’t just a first for Canada. It may be the largest demonstration of its kind in the world, and takes us closer to a day when humans can suck more CO2 from the atmosphere than they dump in.

Carbon Engineering, the Calgary-based company behind the innovation, also plans to use that CO2 to make renewable synthetic fuels, a potential path forward for oil and gas companies as society tries to kick its fossil fuel habit.

“I knew if we could pull this off it would be immense and important, and I wanted to be part of it,” said chief executive officer Adrian Corless.

Rivals include Menlo Park, Calif.-based Global Thermostat, which counts Edgar Bronfman Jr. as its executive chairman, and Zurich-based Climeworks, which counts carmaker Audi as a partner. All three companies are convinced that direct air capture of CO2 is inevitable.

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Carbon Engineering’s work is based on research conducted at the University of Calgary and led by David Keith, now a professor of public policy and applied physics at Harvard University. Keith, who founded Carbon Engineering in 2009, admitted at the time that the idea of capturing CO2 out of the air seemed “absurd,” given that the greenhouse gas only represents 0.04 per cent of what we inhale.

By comparison, the concentration of CO2 emitted from a power plant fuelled by coal is about 10 per cent. Logically, it makes more sense to focus on capturing CO2 directly from industrial flue gases — the focus, for example, of a $20-million XPrize competition launched on Sept. 29. But that approach ignores CO2 produced by transportation, agriculture and buildings, which together represent a third of global emissions.

Keith knew free-air capture wouldn’t just work; it might one day be a necessary weapon in the fight against dangerous climate change. Wind, solar, nuclear power and energy efficiency all reduce emissions from going into the atmosphere, but they are incapable of extracting what’s already up there in the increasingly likely event that safe limits are exceeded.

Plant more trees, you say? Research suggests that plants are comparatively inefficient when it comes to extracting CO2 from the air. It’s vital, Keith said in 2009, “to start thinking about radical new ideas and approaches to solving this problem.”

Six years later, the idea of snatching CO2 from anywhere doesn’t seem so radical. For one, Keith’s team has taken what was just a theory and turned it into a working machine that people can see and touch — and which can be easily replicated. “As the project has progressed, we’ve been able to get a lot more people engaged in believing what we’re doing,” said Corless.

Second, a growing body of evidence over the years suggests that climate change is happening faster than originally thought, and that dramatic measures may be needed to avert its worst effects. This has created wider acceptance within government and business of putting a price on carbon, with the G7 setting a long-term goal of completely phasing out fossil fuel use by 2100.

China, meanwhile, recently confirmed plans to launch a national emission trading system in 2017. According to the World Bank, about 40 national and more than 20 sub-national jurisdictions have put a price on carbon or plan to do so, twice as many as were in that position in 2012. Together, they represent more than a quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The growing acceptance that there’s going to be a requirement to pay for carbon emissions, that’s really changed only in the last 18 months,” said Corless. That’s important, he explained, because as carbon pricing emerges and as the cost of air-capture technology falls, the business case for Carbon Engineering and its rivals will only get stronger.

They have a long way to go. At the moment, carbon is priced at less than $10 a tonne in most jurisdictions, with B.C. at $30 and Sweden on the high end at $130. Where the price goes from here is anyone’s guess, but the number of companies using what’s called “shadow carbon pricing” to estimate the long-term viability of their operations has tripled in just the past year.

These shadow prices can range from $20 to $200 a tonne, giving an indication of where carbon prices are and where companies believe they could go.

Asked if $100 a tonne would be enough for Carbon Engineering to support itself commercially, Keith replied: “That’s getting pretty damn close.”

This article is part of a series produced in partnership by the Toronto Star and Tides Canada to address a range of pressing climate issues in Canada leading up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, December 2015. Tides Canada is supporting this partnership to increase public awareness and dialogue around the impacts of climate change on Canada’s economy and communities. The Toronto Star has full editorial control and responsibility to ensure stories are rigorously edited in order to meet its editorial standards.

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